Has housing reached the 'new normal'?

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The news that home sales increased 7.8% in August and housing starts rose 2.3% had the markets doing a happy dance Wednesday.

Those were the latest numbers in a series that showed that the housing market seems to be finally making its way out of the doldrums. "The U.S. housing recovery is for real," Sal Guatieri, a senior economist with BMO Capital Markets, told The Wall Street Journal.

But tucked into the bottom of most of those happy little stories are the hurdles that housing still needs to leap before this becomes any kind of a normal market. And just what will the new "normal" look like? It's safe to say it won't look like the go-go market of the mid-2000s.

The number of existing homes sold in August was 9.3% above the same time last year, the highest rate since May 2010, when a tax credit spurred sales, the National Association of Realtors reported.  The number of single-family homes upon which construction started was up 27% from last August and at its highest rate since April 2010, according to figures from the Census Bureau.

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The trends look good, but will the trends hold? One looming question is whether the gains of the summer will all be lost during the winter, historically a slower time for home sales.

Then there are the problems that are lingering nationwide: tight credit, job insecurity, high unemployment. In many cities, there are actually more buyers than there are homes to buy, which could also put a dent in some of those happy numbers in upcoming reports.

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"Total sales this year will be 8% to 10% above 2011, but some buyers are frustrated with mortgage availability," NAR President Moe Veissi, broker-owner of Veissi & Associates in Miami, said in a news release. "If most of the financially qualified buyers could obtain financing, home sales would be about 10% to 15% stronger, and the related economic activity would create several hundred thousand jobs over the period of a year."

• Number of improving markets up almost 25%

The national median price for an existing home in August was $187,400, an increase of 9.5% from August 2011.

But while the numbers look good on a national scale, there really is no such thing as a "national" real-estate market. A report released by Realtor.com this week found that 69 of 146 cities had not experienced any increase in real-estate listing prices in the last year. In 31 cities, prices fell.

A few highlights from Wednesday's home-sale numbers:

• The percentage of distressed homes (foreclosures and short sales) was down from 31% of all sales in August 2011 to 22% this past August.
• First-time buyers accounted for 31% of sales, compared with 32% in August 2011.
• A total of 27% of transactions were all cash, up from 22% in August 2011.
• Investors bought 18% of the homes sold in August, down from 22% in August 2011.